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Wednesday, November 15, 2017

This is just the truthiest of truths for me, at the moment. A month ago, I had a whole update written about the job I had and taking the bar exam and all of my life changes. And a few days after I wrote aaaaaaaall of that out, my life changed again: I got a new job that looks to be long-lasting. I passed that bar exam (!!!). I started that new job.So the Texas version of that well-used Gatsby quote: life started all over again when it got below 90° in the fall. A quick recap, because I hate to trash a decent blog draft:Life got away from me again. But this time I have the best excuse ever: THE BAR EXAM.(It is completely necessary to use all caps when referring to THE BAR EXAM. It's out of my hands.) It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the dumbest thing I have ever done in my entire life. I may end up recapping the full BAR EXAM experience in a future post,but I still need some time to work through my PTSD.

For now, I'm working a semi-lawyer job in the oil & gas industry.Which, given my background, makes complete sense, right? 😐Unfortunately, I don't get to wear a cute pink hardhat to work, but I'm now comfortable using oil & gas jargon in real life.

LOL oil, right?

I know where the major shale fields are located, people trust me to work on deals worth crazy amounts of money, and I don't immediately starting giggling when someone talks about the unit they're working on.So I'm basically an adult. Also, I work in an office where half of the employees have "Make Oil and Gas Great Again" hats, so it's been a nice change of pace from the liberal hell of law school. However, I will always & forever assume "OG" means Original Gangster, and not Oil & Gas.That's just who I am as a person.

And now! Now I am a pirate. A pirate lawyer. A lawyer for pirates. A maritime attorney. Something like that.

I get to go on ships! I get to travel! I get to refer to people as Admiral! It's all very exciting. Eventually, I will maritime and admiralty with the best of them, but being a baby lawyer is exhausting and stressful and a very steep learning curve. For now, I do my research: Moby Dick, The Odyssey, Old Man & the Sea, Finding Nemo. All the greats, obviously. With rum in hand. No one ever accused me of not committing to the theme.

(Except I'm doing bar prep at school, so I'll be there every day until July 25. Ugh.) But for all its mosquito-infestation, freezing-in-one-building-sauna-in-the-other, flood-every-time-it-rains, sweaty walls, probable-asbestos terribleness, I'll probably miss that place. Maybe. Eventually. I've practice a lot of restraint over the past three years in not posting every Legally Blonde gif ever. So today, in a journey through my law school emotions, I pay tribute to the original light-haired lady of the law. 1L:

I go here. I guess?

Except it was. Super hard.

That's law school saying that to me. Because law school is a jerk.

But law school was wrong; I was totally smart enough. I just didn't care enough.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE.

2L:Ugh. Stupid boy + stupid law school made 2L year stupid angsty. But then I was all...

I realized that I was trying to be friends with law school people. And law school people are the actual worst. So I stopped trying and ended up being SO. MUCH. HAPPIER.

And because God loves irony, I made some of my best friends and achieved some things I never dreamed of.

3L:Those things I achieved? It turns out they came with responsibilities. So in true Type A fashion, I took on too many things, and put myself in charge of too much, and accepted too many jobs in addition to school. So I'm going to graduation tonight under protest, because I would so much rather sleep until bar prep starts. Until then, I'll be prepping for bar prep (see the above statement about me being all Type A-ey and whatnot) and applying for every legal job every (don't even get me started on how ridiculous this is).

Monday, January 16, 2017

So...hi. It's been awhile. Weird how that happened. Am I even allowed back?

Let's all blame it on Obama and have a moment of silence for his failed presidency & final days in office (not that we're counting down or anything).

And now let's refocus on me:

I start my final day of law school tomorrow.

WHO LET THIS HAPPEN.

Remember when I went to law school - on a whim - just to avoid having to be an adult?

Nobody told me it would go so quickly and adulthood would once again loom menacingly on the horizon!

Quick recap of the minuscule, teeny, so-slight-you-must-have-imagined-it time during which I neglected dear old blog (and the reason for the title of this post):

I spent a fair amount of the spring semester secluded in my journal office studying into the wee hours of the morning, repeatedly asking the security guard if it was okay for me to be there at such weird times.

For the first half of the summer, I worked as a law clerk at a small firm, where I was treated horribly and given far more responsibility than I felt ready for. Weekly happy hour was spent checking that everyone else felt just as inadequate and not-at-all-prepared-for-real-life (misery loves company and whatnot.)

I interned in a court during the second half of the summer, and I got to sit with the bailiff during a capital murder trial. Naturally, I asked anyone who even remotely appeared to be a responsible adult if I should be there because aRE YOU KIDDING ME THERE WAS A MURDERER IN THE ROOM WITH ME I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE CALLED MY MOM FOR PERMISSION.

In the fall, I took on far too many responsibilities and people kept coming to me for advice, so I learned the fine art of inwardly asking if I should even be here ("here" being law school, in a position of authority, adulthood, etc.). I also learned exactly how quickly I can finish an entire bottle of wine and still wake up in time to fight downtown Houston traffic.

And now we are here.

The start of my final semester.

If you are wondering what spring semester of 3L looks like:

And if you are wondering what spring semester of 3L feels like, it's a combination of:

and

The next few months of this blog will likely look eerily similar to the first few months of this blog - a desperate search for a job, figuring out what I want to do in life (this time focused on lawyerly stuff), and a lot of feigned-but-often-very-real apathy. My saving grace: remembering some of the folks who failed even harder than I did for even longer than I did.

Kristen Wiig: job-hopped (probably a barista, TBH) until SNL found her at age 32

JK Rowling: unemployed & super depressed before HP was published when she was 31

Andrea Bocelli: went to law school & worked as a lawyer for a year before being discovered AND LEFT THE LEGAL FIELD BEHIND TO JUST SING HIS LITTLE HEART OUT (obviously my personal fave)